


Small Victories

by m_madeleine



Category: Top Gun (1986)
Genre: Concussions, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Future Fic, Gay Bar, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-16
Updated: 2020-08-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:27:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25791349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/m_madeleine/pseuds/m_madeleine
Summary: Ice and Mav go on a trip, but nothing's ever straightforward when Mav's involved. He'll readily admit that.
Relationships: Tom "Iceman" Kazansky/Pete "Maverick" Mitchell
Comments: 18
Kudos: 48
Collections: Limited Theatrical Release 2020





	Small Victories

**Author's Note:**

  * For [simplecoffee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplecoffee/gifts).



> Set a couple of years post-canon, late 80s to early 90s.

It’s usually Mav who does the drive down, almost every weekend. His test piloting adventures have him stationed a good three hours north of Ice and the barracks don’t make a great setting for conjugal visits. Plus, Mav gets sick to death of being surrounded both by bleak, dusty desert and cocky Air Force pilots. It’s a minor sacrifice for getting to stay on the West Coast, close to Ice (he probably would’ve thought twice about the whole thing if he couldn’t have transferred over from Maryland), but it’s far from great. And Ice just has a nice house, San Diego sunshine and prime beachfront view of people failing at surfing included. So there’s that. 

Except of course, that particular weekend, a week or so after an unfortunate parachute landing — which for the record wasn’t even that bad, Mav was off the crutches in days, though not cleared for flying, but Ice wouldn’t be Ice if he could relax about stuff that.

“Should you even be driving?” — worry palpable in his voice is even through the shit phone connection, and Mav can’t help but smile a little, but still—

“Oh, come on, it’s fi-”

“Not on your deathtrap of a bike it definitely isn’t. Should I drive up? We could get a hotel nearby…”

Ice trails off because of course, there isn’t really anything that is both nearby enough and at a safe enough distance from the base that they could actually relax for a second (and what even would be the point if they can’t). Mav isn’t all that enthused about the prospect of wasting a whole extra three hours in the car to drive back down either. 

“I have an idea.”

“Uh oh,” says Ice, all mock-exasperation hiding a smile. 

“Shut up.” Mav grins back. “Anyway, a couple of years of Cali now and I still haven’t seen much other than endless desert and your surfer’s paradise. So.”

“So?”

Mav shrugs. “Show me some place else?”

“Like where?”

Ice sounds sceptical, but in a good way, paper rustling and pen clicking echoing through the phone. Probably already making a list. Ice likes those.

“Dunno, LA’s halfway?”

Ice snorts, says “The everloving fuck do you want in LA?” and takes charge like he always does. 

To be fair, he’s right to. San Francisco is pretty scenic and probably even worth the long drive, even though the beach is surprisingly cold. Ice manages to look as at home here as in the southern sunshine, zipping up his windbreaker against the whipping wind, and laughing at Mav shivering — and here, maybe, they could afford for Ice to hug him. But Mav knows Ice wouldn’t like that, not even here, not even 6 hours away from home, so he doesn’t push. Just pulls his leather jacket around himself tightly. He does press his knee to Ice’s on the cable car later though and Ice lets him. Small victories. 

Leaving the car all the way downtown and exploring on foot is nice for once, but it’s also the most Mav’s walked in a while, and the twisted ankle is letting itself know. They’re debating the logistics of finding somewhere to sit down when they’ve already eaten, when a bar they walk past makes Mav stop short. He’s not used to those being all that visible, but around here, that’s not even the first one. Flags to a minimum, though, some bikes parked out front. Pretty regular dive, by its looks. Just, well. Gay. 

“What?” Ice asks, and, after a longer look at it, “Really?”

Maverick shrugs. 

“Why not? Not why you brought me here anyway?”

“Not really.” Ice snorts. “For some reason I thought you might appreciate the architecture or something.”

“You’re such a nerd. Anyway, things I appreciate include doing stupid things like kissing you in public and making an ass of myself at karaoke.”

“Oh yeah, singing definitely shows your most attractive side,” Ice deadpans and Mav flips him off and pulls him inside. 

It’s pretty quiet, a solid afternoon crowd. By the bar, the taste of cheap bitter beer on his tongue, Mav slips his hand into Ice’s back pocket and kisses his jaw and Ice winces and goes horribly tense for a second, before relaxing again. Mav still keeps him close, cups the back of his head, making him look him in the eyes.

“Where if not here, huh?” he asks, nudging him and Ice frowns. 

“I know” he says and, like he’s mad at himself, presses his lips to Mav’s in a hard kiss. And that’s not nothing.

They weren’t gonna stay longer than it would’ve taken them to catch a break. But then someone asks Mav about his patches and before he knows it, Mav gets talking bikes with a couple of tough looking guys, who are all _wrong_ , but it’s been a while since he’s had a good disagreement with someone who knows their shit. Ice definitely doesn’t and Mav would feel bad about leaving him hanging, but then it looks like someone talked Ice into playing pool and that’s definitely something Mav would hate to miss. Ice kicking everyone’s asses is always a great sight, even if him and Mav aren’t competing, though well, maybe he should challenge him later, he can 8-Ball as good as anyone, really, and then— 

Well. Losing consciousness is always a treat, really. Topped only by regaining it, even if it’s never once made Mav feel good about himself. It’s almost familiar at this point, as familiar as it can get, noises filtering through first, blurry, fuzzy vision, confused puzzling together of the basics, name, age, job. He’s been there. Getting to the short term stuff is trickier, but, yeah, he remembers the bar… There’s stale cigarette smoke in the air and the ceiling very slowly entering back into his vision is a familiar shade of brown, so he’s still there. Whatever he’s lying on is soft, though, a sofa. That feels safe and not disastrous and Mav finally takes a second to assess his physical state. 

His brow stings. Even more when he feels like it, and his vision is getting just good enough to make out his hand coming away red — but that’s not the bad part. It’s probably one of those that bleed and bleed until it stops and you get it fixed up and then it doesn’t even scar that much. No, the bad part is that he can’t remember how it happened, not even after a couple of moments, and that’s never good. Any attempt to actually focus his eyes meets with awful pounding in his head, so he sticks to listening. The mess of noise has started coming through as actual voices, but not directed at him, too far away. Focusing a bit more, he finally finds Ice in the distance; everything’s muffled, but Ice still sounds loud, comparatively, and with the last of his ability to focus, sentence fragments come through to Mav, but fucked if he knows why Ice is talking about the Navy right now. That’s about as much detective work as Mav is capable of. 

“Ice?” he calls and it doesn’t sound louder than a whisper to him, but then, there’s Ice entering his fuzzy field of vision, leaning over him, a blur of bright blue. 

“Mav, no, don’t get up. We’re gonna get you to the ER, it’s just gonna take a bit.”

Mav blinks at Ice’s silhouette.

“Okay, what— Was there a fight, or-?”

“No, your ankle gave out and you hit your head on the counter going down.”

Mav frowns. Or tries to, at least. It hurts. 

“You joking?”

“No, I fucking wish. How’re you?”

Maverick blinks on against the floating specks. Yeah, he knows that feeling. 

“Really fucking concussed.”

“Yes, you are,” Ice sighs, and there’s a ghost of his touch on his cheek and Ice makes to stand up, and Mav grasps at the slippery fabric of Ice’s windbreaker, despite everything, stupid spike of panic at getting left alone— 

“No, don’t-” 

“Okay,” there’s a rustle and the sofa dips under Ice’s weight, “Okay, I’m here.”

Mav finally, blessedly closes his eyes. He didn’t feel in danger before or anything, but everything automatically feels safer when Ice’s around… even if Ice is rattled himself. Sure, he’s still the Iceman, all steady hands and firm tone, but by now Mav knows how to look for it, his jerky movements, the edge in his voice. He turns, carefully, finds Ice by touch and moves himself closer, runs his hands over the coarse fabric of his jeans, finding pockets and belt loops and rivets, comforting roughness. 

“You can’t even fucking keep your hands to yourself when you’re down, huh,” Ice says, sharpness bleeding out of his voice to be replaced with a smile, that same smile that’s impressed itself upon Mav’s memory over the years, that he doesn’t need to see to recognize. That he can’t help returning every time. 

“What, like I can’t fuck the shit outta you horizontally...vertically...diagonally...”

“You’re making no sense.”

“Never do,” Mav murmurs into his shoulder and Ice laughs. 

“True. Oh, here we go. Can you stand?” 

Barely, it turns out. It takes Ice heaving him up by one shoulder and someone else by the other. Maverick fights against feeling like shit about it, but he’s learned a thing or two about pride over the years. For one, accepting help usually gets you out of medical prison and back into a plane faster.

First step outside, he clenches his eyes shut; even though it’s getting dark, it’s still way too bright, and shit, they’d planned to go somewhere nice to watch the sunset. Just great. Mav leans on the beat-up car he got lead to, someone claps him on the shoulder and when he turns, he sees it’s one of the bikers from earlier. 

“Get better, man. Get a better taste in bikes, too.”

Mav laughs despite himself and tries to clap back, even though with his coordination right now, it ends up more of a swat.

“Gonna come back and race you, betcha-”

“Get in the car, Mav.” Ice sounds exasperated but he shakes the guy’s hand too, before hurrying Mav into the backseat. 

Yeah, the car’s worse than he expected. Mav won’t ever say no to his head in Ice’s lap, but less thrilled when he’s also probably bleeding all over him. The shaking is making him nauseous and despite the honking of the traffic jam around them, his head is swimming, more from tiredness than anything else, and all that’s keeping him from drifting off is the pin-prick pressure of Ice’s nails digging into his hand. The fogginess dissipating has left him with more pain, but some clarity is coming back to him too, and then he can’t believe he hasn’t thought about this before—

“Why didn't you call an ambulance?”

Ice sighs. 

“Mav, I don’t have to explain that to you too, do I. How the fuck would that have looked?”

“Huh.” 

Yeah. Now that he’s thinking of it. Maybe if this were still only the occasional fuck, they wouldn’t even be questioning it, not caring about who saw them and where and what of that gets put on record. Would’ve just had some bullshit _“I collapsed right outside the bar, of course we weren’t inside”_ cover story on the ready, because in a way, this really used to mean nothing to them. Pretty laughable that they should get in trouble for the occasional blow and suck every second enlisted guy had done at least once. But they’ve been at it for years now, neither of them seeing other people for almost as long, and sometimes Mav gets wistful, watching Ice over breakfast on the weekends, messed-up hair but buttering his toast like he’s about to get graded on it; seeing people their age get married off if they weren’t already, the lawsuits in the paper, guys like them getting out there demanding rights… thinking, more and more often, of “guys like them.”

Mav doesn’t know how much of that Ice shares. The limited time they have for each other is always filled up with so many other things to talk about — or not talk at all — but now, with Ice getting curt and snappy as he always does when he’s nervous and scared and struggling to keep things under control — Mav knows that they’re thinking the same here. Of how, even if they’re being a bit ridiculous, a bit overly cautious, yeah. He gets it, the feeling that they’d see right through them, read it on their faces, what it all really means. 

He threads his fingers though Ice’s again, blood flaking onto his palm. As always, there’s something else to talk about. 

“They’re not gonna believe that I fell and slipped,” Mav mutters and Ice huffs. 

“Oh, I’ll just tell them a bit about you, and then they will. Don’t pass out, hear me?”

“Won’t. I’m super awake,” Mav murmurs, leaning his cheek against Ice’s thigh, at least until a hand nudging at his jaw makes him look up. 

The sun has started setting in earnest now, and Ice is bathed in orange and pink and it reminds Mav of lighting in the kind of places they don’t really go to much, for the same reasons, but the idea of which always seemed lovely to him. Droning music and the warm press of bodies and kissing with sugary drinks on their tongue, and in that moment Mav realizes that maybe, once his head gets back to normal, they should, for once. 

Ice smiles down at him and then, abruptly, bends down to kiss him, an awkward press of lips that’ll probably make it into the top 5 of both best and worst kisses of Mav’s life. He never wants it to end, though it does, of course, just seconds later, because they’re in a goddamn car — but Ice smiles more sheepishly than anything and presses Mav’s hand tightly, and says, “You know, I’m kind of disappointed they didn’t actually have karaoke.” 

Mav has to laugh so hard his head starts pounding again, and he resolves then and there, to find more places for both kissing and serenading, because that’s what life should be all about, and maybe he’ll be able to talk Ice into joining him for a song or two, which is going to be all kinds of entertaining (because they both know why Ice keeps talking smack about him; Ice can’t sing for shit either). It sounds pretty wonderful, really. 

And well. Hopefully no one’s gonna have to get stitches. That, too.


End file.
